On Tue, 25 Mar 2003, Bob Parks wrote: > You (Stevan) ought to be able to get to the JCR product on > http://wos.mimas.ac.uk/jcrweb/
The UK national site license allows human access but not software-agent access, which is what we need (not just for this analysis of putative same-journal citation bias, but for a variety of other impact-related studies we want to do). We have been discussing the possibility of a collaborative research project with ISI, however, and if this goes forward then we could have a look at same-journal citation patterns too. > In www.iaes.org/journal/aej/dec_01/liner_pdf.pdf, > they correct for self-citations I believe that's only for author self-citations, not for same-journal citations. >sh>As a measure of "degree of egocentricity" relative to overall >sh>in/out/self citation patterns I (who am not a statistician!) >sh>would at first be inclined to look at the mean and standard error >sh>for the ratio: S = self/(in + out) >sh> T = in/(in + out) >sh>and then for: 1/(T-S) as a rough measure of egocentricity. > > Well that is (in +out)/(in - self) and I am not sure what > that really means. > > I would think that self/(in + out + self) would be a better > first try. Near 1 is very egocentric and near 0 is not very > egocentric... [but] I don't think ONE summary measure can capture > it very well, given the three in/out/self types. I agree that one measure will not be sensitive enough. We will experiment with this. (I think that "self" is part of "in" by the way, in the ISI figures, though I may be wrong.) >sh>It goes without saying that once the journal literature is open-access, >sh>potential journal-based biases like this will be far less consequential > > HUH? Why? If we have OA (complete, universal, all refereed articles), > AND we have journals, then why would journals (in that utopian future) > change their current biases? I said it would be far less consequential. It is consequential in the toll-access era, because journal impact factors partly determine which journals are subscribed to (licensed) by institutions, and therefore they partly determine what we do and do not have (toll)-access to. When all the annual 2,000,000 papers in all 20,000 refereed journals are self-archived and openly accessible to all potential users web-wide, whether or not their institutions can afford a subscription (license) to the toll-access version, then it *matters* far less what the journal impact factor happens to be, whether or not it has been inflated, and whether or not a given institution, as a result, subscribes to (licenses) the toll-access version. The self-archived open-access version of everything is available to all would-be users in any case. Moreover, the scientometric correction for any inflated same-journal citations could even be corrected in authors' *personal* citation counts, if desired. The open-access full-text database could be used in a much more powerful and flexible way by all users and evaluators of research productivity. (In other words, I may lose a few citations because they are detectably just part of the inflated same-journal citations of some journal they have appeared in. (But I hope you agree that this bit of fine-tuning is not likely to be very consequential either.) > So, is the 'consequential' bias "there is every temptation to get those > journal impact factors as high as possible" and that would go away in OA? > If journals serve the same purpose in the UOA (Utopian OA) as they do now, > won't that temptation be the same? The core purpose served by journals in the UOA (universal open access) era will be exactly the same as it is now: to provide peer-review and to certify publication standards as having been successfully met (at that journal's established quality level). This is the core "publish-or-perish" function, and it remains unchanged. How long the additional journal publication functions (paper version, publisher's online PDF, dissemination, storage, access-provision) will continue to be needed (and hence paid for), instead of being off-loaded entirely on the interoperable instiututional self-archiving network, is not something that I or anyone can or need guess. http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/harnad.html#B1 All that needs to be understood is that once there is open access, no more potential usage or impact will be lost because of inability to pay access tolls: and that is the *only* thing open-access is about. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/unto-others.html (And, as I said, if there is still any residual temptation to inflate journal impact through same-journal citation, it will matter a good deal less, and will be a lot more detectable and correctable.) >sh>because there will be many direct measures of a paper's or author's >sh>research impact, among which the citation impact factor of the journal >sh>in which the paper appeared will be a relatively minor one. > > Well, I can only think within my own profession. If journals are > around in the UOA, I think that their 'rankings' will be about the > same and for the same reasons. Some will get higher, some lower, > but for the most part they will remain the same. But who will care, since it is the impact of the research and the researcher that matters, not the impact of the journal (which is merely the average impact of the papers it publishes)? > I don't see why what journal the article appeared in as being > a minor measure. The current situation is based on the referee > system and self selection. Top journals have top referees and > get top articles. UOA will not lessen that, and I doubt that > dept chairs, or deans will think that an article in a third > tier journal is worth much even if all of the other 'direct > measures' available in UOA are high. But I agree completely! The top journals (i.e., the ones exercising the most rigorous peer review and selectivity, hence maintaining the highest quality standards) will continue to be given due weight for that -- along with the weight coming from the article's and the author's various measures of research impact (usage ["hits"], citations, "authority co-citations," etc.). Research impact will not be estimated by just the one-dimensional measure consisting of the journal's average citation count, but by a rich and diverse regression equation, with multiple weighted predictors. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving.htm Stevan Harnad
